Bad news: dieting is a life sentence

Melbourne-based professor Michael Cowley, one of the global leaders in obesity research, once said to me with a shrug, "we need food to live, so it stands to reason that there would be some serious hard-wiring in our brains telling us to eat".

For many of us, with food around every corner — the first thing you see when you enter the Melbourne Sports and Aquatic Centre for example, is about five vending machines — and with the vast majority of that food containing more energy than any human should ingest in one sitting, that hard-wiring, and the environment we live in, is ensuring that we get more than we need. No one’s disputing that.

Considering professor Cowley’s statement, the argument that it’s about self-control is a seriously skewed one. Count how many times you are presented with the real possibility of buying something to eat in your daily life: it’s an unfair fight.

What about how the average supermarket is stocked? I’ve often wondered what the food pyramid would look like next to a supermarket pyramid: one based on the ratios of food we should eat each day, and the other presenting the ratio of foods on offer in a supermarket. They should probably look the same. I doubt whether they even resemble each other.

The other argument is that a supermarket doesn’t have a moral responsibility to tell us what to eat. We as consumers dictate, to a great degree, what is on those shelves. If the chocolates are barely making it to the check-out before they’re engulfed, then that’s what they’ll stock. But it’s a mental challenge too great for many of us to live in dietary moderation. Conversely, we also shudder at the thought of a government or supermarket dictating what we should be eating, or overpricing junk food to deter us. There really is nowhere to turn.

I followed a man for a year who gained 40 kilos of body fat intentionally to better understand what it feels like to be obese, before losing it again. It was a full 12-month journey that we turned into a documentary, Fat and Back. Throughout the full gamut of emotions he experienced, as well as the emotions experienced by those who were trying to lose weight around him, the end-result appeared to be pretty straightforward on the surface. Those that were regularly at the gym lost the weight; those that weren’t, didn’t. To consider the emotions involved — and they are certainly pervasive — generally surrounds setbacks.

I remember watching a Billy Connelly documentary, where he said "in life, we spend too much time asking why. Instead, we should be asking how". It struck a chord. The question of how – how can I achieve this end, how can we stop making junk food so accessible – can lead to action. The question of why – why do I need to do this, why me, why are we here, why am I big – usually leads to contemplation. Sometimes this leads to the how question, and a positive process follows. Sometimes it leads to the fridge.

Many articles, thinkers and motivators try to teach people how to achieve their goals, but often the recipient isn’t really asking. They may not succeed, but they’re the ones with the power in numbers.

Fewer than 10% of diets work, and I believe one of the reasons is because diets, in the sense that we know them, imply there is an end. Research has shown that once your body has spent an extended amount of time at a given weight, it wants to stay there and will fight to stay there. If you’ve been overweight or obese for a long time, then staying beneath that weight may well be a life-long journey.

The good news is, you don’t need to be under 10% body fat to drastically improve your health outlook, and you don’t need to get there in 12 weeks. Every kilo you lose, no matter how slow, and subsequently keep off, will benefit you later in life.

I myself have struggled to keep my weight consistent, despite everything I have learned as a young amateur athlete, as the editor of a fitness magazine, and now as a director of an obesity documentary. If it’s a life-sentence, if it’s about ongoing management of a problem, then I believe it’s a condition that needs to be viewed as such, as opposed to being the consequence of poor lifestyle choices.

Like a diabetes sufferer manages their condition daily, and in a different sense, an alcoholic is always recovering no matter how long it’s been since their last drink, if you’ve recently lost weight, you’re not now a slim person. If you’re trying to lose weight, your target weight isn’t the end of the road. You’re managing a condition. As a result, don’t put a time limit on it. It’s daily.

Instead of phrases like, "I lost 40 kilos this year" to be common place, wouldn’t it be better for phrases such as, "I’m now 10 years in a healthy weight range", to become part of the vernacular? Wouldn’t that be a change in perspective?